On 5 December 2024,
Amnesty International released a report which concluded that the Israeli state
is committing genocide in Gaza in the strict legal sense of the term.[1] On
19 December 2024, Human Rights Watch released a report on the Israeli state’s
intentional deprivation of access to water, a necessity of life, from the
population of Gaza, and concluded that this amounts to an act of genocide.[2] These reports reinforce the opinions
of dozens of Holocaust and genocide scholars, the South African government’s
testimony before the International Court of Justice, the court’s own rulings,
and ‘overwhelming evidence – photos, videos, and eyewitness accounts –
documenting the destruction of essential conditions for life’.[3]
In fact, what we are
seeing in Gaza today is the inevitable consequence of the model of European
colonialism chosen by the original Zionists: not just occupying a colony and
dominating it, not even the apartheid form of settler-colonialism that needed
the indigenous people’s labour, but the model of settler-colonialism that
wanted the land without the people, as in the Americas and Australia. Their plan to create an ethno-religious Jewish state in a
land where only 8 percent of the population was Jewish in 1914 required 92
percent of Palestinians to be removed from their land.[4]
Raphael Lemkin, the
Holocaust survivor who lost 49 members of his family in the Nazi genocide and
who coined the term ‘genocide,’ had studied the phenomenon historically, and
found that settler-colonialism which engaged in what was then called forced
displacement and is now called ethnic cleansing inevitably entailed genocide.
Because how do you clear the land of the people living in it? As he knew from
experience, by massacres and the threat of massacres, by taking away people’s
homes and livelihoods and herding them into ghettos, by subjecting them to
conditions that make life impossible, and finally by killing all those who
remain: exactly what has been happening in Palestine since 1948.[5]
Despite references to the
so-called ‘two-state solution,’ it was evident from the beginning that the
Israeli state had no intention of allowing a Palestinian state to be
established on even a small fraction of Palestinian territory. The intention of
establishing the Israeli state over the entirety of Palestine has been
expressed openly in recent years, with Benjamin Netanyahu displaying a map of
the region in the UN in September 2023 with no vestige of Palestine.[6] The ‘two-state solution’
has finally been laid to rest by Israel’s Knesset voting overwhelmingly to
reject Palestinian statehood on 18 July 2024, making it clear that so long
as the Israeli state exists, there will be no Palestinian state.[7] Indeed, according to
Finance Minister Belazel Smotrich, the Israeli state should encompass not just
Palestine but also extend into Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Iraq and Saudi
Arabia.[8]
Given that around 95
percent of the land controlled by Israel has been acquired through the forcible
expulsion of the original Palestinian population, it is not surprising that it
rejects both international law and UN principles, which would rule out such a
course of action. The participation and complicity of Western nations in these
violations ensured the descent of ethnic cleansing into genocide. For example,
while the Israeli bombardment of Gaza after the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023
was targeting civilians and slaughtering thousands of children, these leaders
and the mainstream media justified it by citing ‘Israel’s right to defend
itself,’ trying to provide credibility to a flagrant lie. In any case, ‘To
suggest that the thief has any kind of “right” to “defend” stolen property is
ludicrous. The right belongs to the person fighting for its return, as the
Palestinians have been doing every day since 1948. Beyond the 5-6 percent the
Zionist land purchasing agencies actually bought before 1948, the Israelis are
living on and in stolen property. They will defend it but they have no “right”
to defend what by any legal, moral, historical or cultural measure belongs to
someone else.’[9]
So long as the Israeli
state exists, its genocide in Palestine will continue, and so will its bombing
and occupation of neighbouring states like Lebanon and Syria. The war with
Hamas will also continue, because resistance to genocide is inevitable, and if
non-violent resistance is crushed, it will be violent. Israel has murdered
peaceful demonstrators in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza,[10] and Zionists in powerful
positions in other countries have tried to shut down the non-violent BDS
(Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement.[11] They have arrested and
beaten peaceful pro-Palestine demonstrators including Jews, and punished people
expressing support for Palestine by taking away their jobs or university
places. In their zeal to crush non-violent support for Palestine, Zionists have
teamed up with neo-Nazis like the AfD in Germany, putting Jews in greater
danger of their antisemitic violence.
Israel has never been a
democracy; no ethno-religious or ethnic state – whether Jewish, Christian,
Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist or other – can be a democracy, because those who don’t
belong to the dominant group will not have equal rights; at best it will be an
apartheid state, at worst a genocidal one. In the past, however, Jewish
citizens of Israel have enjoyed a fair range of democratic rights, but these
have been drastically eroded as Israel descended from apartheid to genocide.
Ofer Cassif, the only Jewish Member of the Knesset from the left-wing Hadash
Party, says, ‘alongside genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, atrocities,
occupation, and persecution of Palestinians in their territories, there’s also
fascism growing stronger in Israel by legislation and by the persecution of
citizens, arresting people, beating people, etc. Israel is on the verge of a
full-fledged fascist regime.’[12] The Israeli state has
become a menace even to its own Jewish citizens.
The solution proposed by
the One Democratic State Initiative (ODSI) is a democratic, inclusive
Palestinian state in the whole of Palestine, ‘from the river to the sea,’ in
which all citizens would have equal rights regardless of ethnic or religious
identity.[13]
They answer the question of why it should be called ‘Palestine’ by saying, ‘For
the same reason why Theodor Herzl, Arthur Balfour, the World
Zionist Organization, the British Mandate and the League of Nations called
it Palestine, why the “Jewish Agency for Israel” was originally
called the “Jewish Agency for Palestine”, why they considered
naming the Jewish state “Palestine” (and only dropped it in
anticipation of partition), and why Shimon Perez and Golda Meir held Palestinian
citizenship: Because “Palestine” has been the land’s name for over 2500
years. Unlike the Hebrew word “Israel”, which is exclusive to
Judaism and therefore exclusive
of non-Jews, “Palestine” refers, not to an Arabic or
Islamic identity, but to the geographical area where a democratic state can
treat all its citizens equally, regardless
of how they choose to identify.’
Wouldn’t this mean the
ethnic cleansing or genocide of Israeli Jews? Not at all. ‘Although there is no
universal consensus on the conditions that define one’s belonging to a society,
the principles of jus soli (“right of soil”, the right of an
individual born in a territory to be a citizen of its state) and jus
sanguinis (“right of blood”, the right of an individual to hold their
parents’ citizenship) are commonly applied… In accordance with the above, …Palestinian
citizenship will be extended to all native Palestinians, including all who were
expelled over the past century and their descendants. Citizenship will also be
extended to all who were born in Palestine and who wish to become
citizens of the new democratic Palestinian state… At no point shall religious,
ethnic, cultural or other identity be a criterion for granting or denying
citizenship or residency.’ In other words, Israeli Jews who were born in
Palestine, or have parents who were born in Palestine, would have the right to
be citizens of the new democratic state on the basis of equal rights.
Doesn’t the state of
Israel have the right to exist? ‘The Zionist project has disregarded the basic
democratic rights of the (Jewish and non-Jewish) population of Palestine by
effecting, with essential British colonial help, the mass immigration of
non-Palestinians to Palestine prior to 1948 and by establishing a “state
exclusive to Jews” in Palestine in 1948 with no democratic mandate to do so.
The continued existence of a
state exclusive to Jews rather than a democratic state
of all its citizens means that the trampling of these democratic human rights
is ongoing and is therefore not “right”. A transition to a
democratic state of all its citizens would right this century-old wrong and
would be a historic step in achieving just and lasting peace in Palestine and
the Middle East.’
Is the establishment of a
democratic state in place of Israel antisemitic? ‘Claiming that a democratic
solution is antisemitic implies that Judaism is antidemocratic, and that is
antisemitic… Zionism has used Judaism to justify its settler colonial project… and
has effectively conflated Judaism and Jewishness with colonialism in the eyes
of Jews and non-Jews alike. It is noteworthy that although
Zionism is the only ideology to have succeeded at establishing a state for one
identity over others in Palestine, the ODS solution does not single it out as
the sole ideology to aim at doing so, and is also opposed to the creation of a
state exclusive to Arabs, Muslims, or any other identity.’
Indeed, none of what has
been suggested above is antisemitic according to the definition proposed by
hundreds of Jewish scholars in the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism,
provided ‘the same norms of debate that apply to other states and to other
conflicts over national self-determination apply in the case of Israel and
Palestine.’[14]
Thus, for example, one would have to apply the same norms of debate that apply
to Ukraine’s struggle against Russia for self-determination to Palestine’s
struggle against Israel for self-determination.
ODSI suggests that
supporters of Palestine carry on doing what they have been doing – taking part
in demonstrations, educating themselves and others about what has been
happening in Palestine for over a century, participating in the BDS movement,
and so on – but, in addition, emphasising that One Democratic State is the
goal, and coordinating our efforts with others who share that goal.[15]
Ending Israel’s genocide
in Palestine is a priority right now. 153 countries have ratified the Genocide
Convention but it is considered to be binding even on those countries which
have not done so, and political leaders in all of them are under an obligation
to prevent Israel from committing genocide by cutting off all
relations with Israel and imposing full sanctions on it, and punish
all those involved in it, from the Israeli political leadership down to every
soldier. Failing this, they would be guilty of complicity with genocide, which
is also a crime under the Genocide Convention. We, the peoples of these
countries, who have been watching in anguish the carnage which Holocaust
survivor Gabor Maté compared to Auschwitz,[16] are under an obligation
to put maximum pressure on our political leaders to abide by the Genocide
Convention. The Indian National Congress government of newly-independent India
made absolutely the correct decision when it voted against the partition of
Palestine and establishment of Israel in November 1947, and India should reclaim
that moral high ground.
(This article was
published by The India Forum on 29 December 2024, and is available at https://www.theindiaforum.in/politics/ending-israels-genocide-palestine
[13] One Democratic
State Initiative, ‘One Democratic Palestine, From the River to the Sea.’ (The
quotations that follow are from this url: https://odsi.co/en/#faqR )